>> John Boylan: Welcome. I'm John Boylan and I coordinate the studio 99
project that includes this discussion series, along with the art projects
that we run in the space in the atrium. And visiting artist program.
Today we have as our speaker Michael Gough, who joined Microsoft in
February of this year as the corporate vice-president of design for the
applications and services group.
I won't go into his whole bio except to say prior to coming to Microsoft
he was vice-president of experience design at Adobe systems, leading its
multidisciplinary experience creation organization. Today he is here to
talk about visual literacy and drawing.
So I will say no more. Michael? Thank you.
>> Michael Gough:
[applause.]
Excellent.
Thanks, John.
>> Michael Gough:
[laughter.]
You should wait and do that after the talk.
>> John Boylan: One detail. I forgot to mention the, for people
listening online, the comment question button has been clicked. So if
they want to comment or question, they will be able to.
>> Michael Gough: Oh, fantastic. That will be good.
So as John said, my previous role was the head of design at Adobe. And
this talk was actually created when I had that role. So as a little bit
of background I want to talk about where this comes from. Adobe is not
unusual in software companies in that they are always trying to figure
out how to make more money. It is something about companies. I don't
know what it is, but they just seem to think money is important. And
Adobe over the years had figured out that there wasn't much money in
creatives because, you know, they are all broke. And so they wanted to
be an enterprise company in the worst possible way. Then they wanted to
be a developer company. And they just kept wanting to be something.
And about four years ago all hell broke loose in the popular press and
the trade journals and corporations, everybody was talking about design.
Design was the key to, well, making all that money. And so company after
company started investing heavily in their design organizations and
people started talking about being design-led and it became clear to
Adobe and some -- I may have helped with this a little bit, that design
was actually a legitimate business. Creatives were actually a legitimate
customer. In other words, they had money now. And so we set out on this
journey to essentially reposition Adobe as a creative company, taking a
lot of cues from companies like Nike that figured out: Well, if you just
convince everybody that they are an athlete, you can sell them stuff.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: And the same thing was true at Adobe. Convince
everybody they are creative, and this is the creative company, so you
just want to be a part of their world.
While that was going on, we were creating the creative cloud. It turns
out it's a great business study. And it gets tons of attention and they
are making lots of money. But for me, one of the most interesting points
was: What does it mean to be creative? When are we creative? And I had
this one observation that led to this talk, which is: I don't know what
creativity is. I don't know how it happens. But I do know nobody does
it in Adobe's tools. You don't open photo shop and get creative. In
fact, I had a team of 130-something creatives and they always dropped the
mouse and the keyboard and started drawing. So creativity was happening
on pieces of paper with pencils and pens. So I set out to try to figure
out why. And that's sort of what this talk is about.
So I want to start with the creativity question. It turns out for years
and years we have been able to pretty successfully divide people into
creative and noncreative. Some of the reasons for that are pretty
pernicious, but some of them make total sense. And later in the talk
I'll talk about it a little bit more. But most people find themselves
identifying with either the left column or the right column. There are
always some overlaps. Any time you generalize about people, you get into
trouble. But again getting in trouble generally speaking, you're either
-- most of you are either emotionally attached to things or you are
logically attached to things. You tend to focus either on the big
picture or the detail. You think mostly from your imagination or you
focus mostly on facts.
There are plenty of gray areas in between that, but there are these
general differences. It used to be that the way we thought about that is
the left side of the brain was responsible for one part and the right
side of the brain was responsible for the other part. We know that's not
true. We also know it doesn't seem to matter. People still act like
that. So even though it is not a functional representation of the brain,
it is a pretty useful representation of the way people think.
So it turns out that people who run companies and people who do major
engineering efforts and a lot of people in things like politics love
deductive and analytical thinking. It's just comforting. That's the
idea that you know what the answer is and it's just awesome. Right? We
cooked the numbers. We put together the spreadsheet. We had a bunch of
statistics. We know what the answer is. It gives you a sense of
control.
It turns out that that sense of control is not real, but it still is
useful. Then taking it one step further, I love what Albert Einstein
said: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we
used when we created them."
Is everybody here a Microsoft employee? Is that how it works?
>> John Boylan:
Occasionally.
>> Michael Gough:
>> John Boylan:
Almost everybody?
Yeah.
>> Michael Gough: Somebody sneaks in every once in awhile but by and
large you are all Microsoft people.
So over the past, I don't know, 25 or 30 years? Being rigorously
logical, being intensely focused on quantities more than qualities has
made this one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world,
which is awesome.
There's an interesting question as to whether or not that will continue
to be true. So it is not like we created a pile of problems. We
actually created a bunch of wonderful solutions. It's just, will we
create the next wave of solutions using the sale mode of thinking?
would argue no. But I'll argue about that some other time.
[laughter.]
I
>> Michael Gough: So anyway, it's not like being creative or creativity
in general is the only way to tackle sort of the next generation of
problems, but it turns out it used to be not a way at all. Creativity
was widely disregarded. It was seen as a low level skill. It wasn't
applied to most of the problems that we face. And that is changing. I
alluded to that earlier. You know, when you have the Harvard business
review writing their latest version of their journal all about design
thinking, if you have people writing book after book focused on this,
then you know that the tide is changing.
I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about this. But I'm kind of famous
for talking about things I'm not supposed to talk of. Last week and -yeah, whatever. I can talk about it. Last week, do you guys know about
Harvard's -- I mean, not Harvard's. God, they are going to hate me for
that. Stanford's D School? Hopefully nobody's listening.
Stanford D School? IDEO created it. It's focused on teaching creative
strategies, design strategies to a much broader audience than just
designers. So they are taking non-flaky people and teaching them the
flaky skills.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: Speaking of non-flaky and flaky, they were here, D
School was here this past Thursday. I was able to work with Sachia to
basically take his SLT. The leaders of this company, through design
training. I have been client sensitivity training, like I don't expect
any of them to be designers.
[laughter.]
>> Michael Gough: But I'm hoping they will understand the design
perspective is valuable and understand why.
So it's a good segue to this. I honestly believe that everybody is
creative. It is not binary. That list isn't totally true. But there's
a whole bunch of things that happen during our life that either make us
distrust our own creativity or block it completely. And I have this
little experiment that I have been doing. It is actually been pretty,
pretty effective. I can predict when you stopped being creative. The
way I predict it is just use the -- there are psychologists that have
very carefully organized the stages of development of drawing to the
stages of psychological development. And so when you start with the
scribbling phase, which lasts until about age 2, it is just kinesthetic
activities. I mean, monkeys can do the same thing, right? It's actually
quite wonderful. I notice you're kind of a doodler. So some of that is
just that kinesthetic sense, right? Oh, yeah, I'm feeling great!
And so we all do this. There's, you can take the most rigidly logical
person and you still see them every once in awhile take their pencil and
make a few interesting shapes.
In the next phase, the shapes start to have some meaning. This is the
pre-schematic phase. It is your first attempt to sort of create forms.
Almost all people, all humans' drawings get past this phase. Almost all.
I met at least one CEO.
[laughter.]
>> Michael Gough: -- that I think stopped drawing about 3. In fact, I'm
going to tell that story really quick. A couple years ago I got on stage
to launch Adobe's first foray into hardware. It was a pen and a ruler.
A digital pen and a digital ruler. I was on stage with -- actually he is
not a CEO. He is only a GM. David Wadhwani, the GM. I asked him to do
a drawing, because we were showing off what this, these new tools are
going to be like and what they are going to enable. He did a circle, two
eyes, and like these antennas which I think were supposed to be the arms
but he just didn't know where they went. I mean he drew basically at
exactly this level.
Afterwards, back stage and this is long before I got this talk together.
I was asking him: Like, did you just not draw as a kid? And so he grew
up in India. He grew up with parents who decided he was going to be an
engineer from the time he was 3. So all these other pursuits, he is just
not supposed to do that stuff. Like no crayons! Get over it!
Now, most people get a little farther than David Wadhwani did. So this
is the phase after the pre-schematic phase. Schematic, six years old.
You are starting to actually portray your knowledge of the world. Or
what I like to say is you are starting to learn more about the world
while you are drawing. And you make these like wonderful complete
landscapes. Actually, most of us get through this phase as well. And
about this time around 6 years old, if you asked any classroom of kids
around this age if they are creative, they would all raise their hands.
At this point we are pretty secure that we have an entire population of
creative people.
The next phase we start to bring in more complexity. We are starting to
draw more realistically. About eight to ten years old, things are still
kind of going okay, but a couple of people have self selected or been
selected by their overbearing parents to be, I don't know, athletes. You
know, the next quarterback or batter or a couple of other kids have
started to feel a little uncomfortable because you're feeling just a
touch of peer pressure, not too bad. Then this happens.
You have been focused now, you're about 8 to 10 years old. You are
starting to draw your world realistically. You are starting to represent
it, you're trying to understand it. And somebody says: Nice sheep! It
is well meaning. But it was a cloud. And you're shattered. I mean,
your parents or your teacher, their opinion is incredibly important to
you. And they have made a critical error because there is this
dissonance now between what you intended and what you accomplished, and
you are crushed and you are right at that age where you are pretty
sensitive about it. So you just stop drawing. You will find tons of
people stop drawing about this stage. Their drawings, too, look like
those wonderful, my entire world is flat. You know, the road goes up
like this and the house is flat and it goes on top of it. They do stop
there. And this is like every executive in corporate America.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: Except for my old boss, Mark Parker who can draw like
-- do you guys know who he is? He is the CEO of Nike. And he was a shoe
designer. So I love telling his story only because that was a Designer 1
and some Designers 2. You get a little older, you get to a pseudonaturalistic stage, about 12 years old. You really are focused on the
end product. It means a lot to you. The actual drawing as a thing you
can share with other people, that you can be proud of. You're trying to
figure out how to draw the world. So perspective comes into it. Even
pretty crappy two-point perspective. But you're at least trying to get
it right.
That's when your art classes get canceled.
[laughter.]
>> Michael Gough: So you had a good support structure for this. You
were making good progress. And of course, they told you it's STEM, not
STEAM, and the art program doesn't fit into it and you are done there.
You will see tons of people, probably now we are at least half of -well, this seems like it's probably a pretty creative group or you
wouldn't be here, so you self select for these skills.
If you took the average population of Microsoft people, probably about 50
percent of them could do a crude perspective. Could start to think
about, you know, analyzing a drawing that way. Most of them would give
it up. The next phase is super, super important in a lot of different
ways. So this is the actual period of decision. You are deciding
whether or not this drawing stuff means anything to you, whether
creativity means anything to you. You are super, super self conscious
about what you can or can't do. And this is the most pernicious, the
most negative thing that we do in our schools right now. I told this to
every school I have had an opportunity to talk with. We just tell people
they are not talented enough.
Now, picture this. Imagine that you are working on your, where are we
at, like seventh or eighth grade now? Your eighth grade essay. You've
spent weeks on it. The teacher looks over your shoulder, reads the first
paragraph and says: I don't see any Kerouac in here. You should just
give up writing.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: We do this withdrawing. We tell people you don't have
the talent, just stop. I mean, what we do is we cut people off from
this, as I will try to explain in the rest of the talk, this incredible
vital skill that supports creativity, that supports thinking. We would
never do that with writing. We have come to understand how fundamental
reading is to processing information, to communicating. Yet we take this
other skill away.
So that's the point. You can definitely survive without knowing how to
read. But I mean, it helps, right? I would argue the exact same thing.
You can definitely survive without drawing, but it is absolutely
fundamental to being creative and it unlocks a whole other parts of your
brain. Brain! So there's evidence that language -- I'm not a scientist.
That's probably obvious.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: But when they got over the left brain/right brain
thing, it was about the time they had MRIs. They could start really
looking at what parts of your brain get activated by what activities.
Activated by what activities? That's got to be right. And what they did
find is that when you are making symbols, when you're talking or you're
just communicating with basic symbols, you use one part of your brain.
When you are actually drawing to try to make something, a shape, an
object, you use a completely different part of your brain.
Then the two parts of the brain, one is associated with logic and the
other is associated with emotion and essentially creativity. So the link
is there. I mean, it's just science. So a lot of us figure out what we
want to do with it. So that's my entire talk in one slide. Drawing
might be the key that unlocks creativity. I probably said it three times
so far, but I figured I would put it up there just in case any of you
weren't quite -- like I didn't do my job right or, because we should
blame me, right? It shouldn't be your fault if you didn't get it.
And this is pretty interesting. If you draw regularly, I am absolutely
convinced it will change your brain. You will use parts of your brain
you don't get to use very often and it will also train it so you'll use
it more. So you've got to draw.
And now towards the end I won't just tell you to go draw. I'll actually
make some suggestions about how to approach it.
There was something really interesting there that's gone.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: What was that? Oh, I know what it was. It's okay,
we'll pass it.
So it turns out that when people doodle, we're just going to make you
officially the doodler. There's probably others here, but I caught you.
It turns out when you start, and it might just be the kinesthetic sense,
but when you start just making those random shapes or when you get more
into drawing analytically, you open up these other parts of your brain
and you think more openly and creatively. This doesn't happen when you
write. It's different. I don't know why. There are some incredibly
creative writers. I don't want to take that away from them. It's a
great way to express creativity. Actually, one thing that I should try
to make really clear is the ways that people who are creative express
their ideas are not necessarily the same ways that they get them. And so
when you see somebody that draws really well and you kind of go that must
be how they are creative, no, no, no. They have mechanisms for being
creative and they have mechanisms for presenting the creativity. In
general, writing is a mechanism for presenting creativity and some people
are better at with being creative while they do it, but by and large even
they doodle. They hand write. They do other things. We'll talk about
that more in a little bit.
And this is this other thing that there might be a connection to is you
will find most people who draw and try to draw things that are
representational, like they try to draw the world around them, it has to
be quiet. They struggle if they have to talk too much because again,
different parts of the brain are trying to work and are working at cross
purposes. This is the first drawing that is actually mine. I put, tried
to put image credits everywhere. Sometimes I couldn't find them anymore.
That's one of the down sides of the Internet. It's just a cow.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: One of the interesting things about drawing is it's a
way to represent things. And so one of the ways we represent things,
this is also a cow. I think it's Wikipedia. Cows are big, blocky
creatures that come in a variety of colors, sizes and even shapes. Most
images that come to mind ... I mean, we can spend the rest of the talk,
you can just read that.
But that's also a cow. Both are useful. Like sometimes you need an
incredibly technical description of something. You need a lot of detail.
And writing is pretty good at that. One of the things that's really
wonderful about drawing is it's a lot easier to get to a common
understanding quicker. And sometimes what happens is you engage other
parts of your brain when you're looking at it. And so you learn more
about it faster. And so I think I may have mentioned earlier that I have
been doing this talk to a lot of schools. It's gone much better than my
talk about copying. I did a total aside, but for about a year I would go
from school to school and also work with Adobe's education leaders, which
is an organization of like two or 300 educators throughout the country
that they stay connected with so they can sell them stuff.
But the talk that I gave them was about why copying is so important to
early development and all that, all that bull shit about not copying
people and ruined my chances of having strong designers because
designers' most important skill is seeing the world around them,
understanding it, essentially copying it and making it better. Another
talk.
But when I was talking to them, I was trying to explain that drawing is
fundamental, or could be fundamental to learning. So you don't need to
teach people to draw. You need to have them draw because it will help
them learn. One of the things that they have found about this is,
there's this, in school they take drawing pads and they cut them in half.
Or writing pads. And they force -- force. Force children, encourage
children to draw before they write. When they do it, when they do that
activity and it is not about who self selects to draw and who doesn't,
but if you have people draw before they write, the writing is better.
It's richer, it's more complete. It is more visual. And so again, this
same point being made again and again and again until I bore you with it.
But there's this huge connection and advantage. But one of the down
sides of it that we have to address is most people, and this was a
college professor who teaches a math class that requires drawing. She
said that people love the math, that part was easy. It was that drawing
part that just destroyed them.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: Which again might come from, you know, these early
things, these early like social pressures. This point where somebody
convinced us that we couldn't draw. And then doodling. This is sunny
gave a talk at TED. I have been addicted to TED for years. It's still
one of my guilty pleasures, more guilty now than ever because they are
kind of a sham organization. I probably shouldn't say that if it is
going to be recorded.
But some TED talks are really, really good. Sunny's is really good and
she was talking about the relationship between doodling and thinking and
how valuable it is. So let's talk about why we draw. Because there's a
lot of can different kinds of drawing and a lot of different purposes for
it. One of them, and this is one of my favorite ones, is just to
explore. To give shape to your ideas. One of the things that is really
nice about drawing is when you give, you externalize the idea, you can
look at it, evaluate it. It fires other ideas. But also when you
externalize it you can share it with other people, right? So the drawing
now is a great way to collaborate. I have a slide in another talk
somewhere that has a whole board room full of people. You know, just
everybody in a suit. Old school, mad men style. And what happens is
they get in a room and they talk for hours. And then maybe somebody
comes up and does a Power Point presentation with 400 things that they
should do together. And all along what they are working on is getting to
some common view, some sort of agreement.
I found it really, really fascinating because in those environments, and
we are all in those environments every day, meetings, we do work really
hard using language to come to some common agreement about this thing
that we are going to make or do. And I promise you, if it's only
language every time you go out the door you are as disconnected as you
are with when you went in. Because if you don't visualize it, if you
don't make it real in some way, it is so easy for everybody to have their
own interpretation of the words. It's still sort of true withdrawing,
but it is why design is so powerful right now because most designers
draw. It is not as powerful as code, by the way, for any of you who are
developers. I think you should just frigging code it and show it. We
should be able to get to the point where you should be able to code at
least as fast as you draw, at least for experiences that people touch and
interact with.
The whole point is when it's a thing, when it's real, when you can get
your brain all around it, it's a lot easier to get on the same page. It
should be easier to convince all those guys in those suits in those board
rooms, right, if it's a competition between a Power Point deck with slide
after slide of statistics, and some drawings of a thing? The drawings of
the thing should win. They haven't historically, but I don't know if
you've noticed it, I have been in meetings -- I have been here for six
months now. I have been in meeting after meeting and almost without
exception the product is talked about and the statistics are shared, and
the thing itself is never shown. I was giving Sachia a really hard time
about that. They have PLT meeting, product leadership meeting and
sometimes they don't look at the product.
[laughter.]
>> Michael Gough:
on.
>> John Boylan:
I'm getting in more and more trouble as this talk goes
You can uncheck the --
>> Michael Gough: Uncheck that box? There's some boxes about whether or
not you share the talks and I checked both. Maybe I should go back.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: So the point is, it's really, really hard to think
about things that are just stuck in your head. It's also really, really
hard to just fool yourself. You make it external and it will help.
So this is Milton Glasser basically on the same topic. It's ideation.
Ideation drawing, just bring something out into the world seen around it,
making things happen. Another reason we draw is to perceive. This is a
great thing to do. Not everybody is going to have the time. Like
everybody should meditate. How many people actually do?
It's just such a pain in the ass.
This sort of drawing is almost the exact same thing. It is definitely
for the benefit of the person drawing. You observe the world. You
record it. The thing that is amazing about it is you observe the world
completely differently than you would if you were just walking by it. As
an experiment, some number of years ago, because my son was about this
tall and he's this tall now, we were traveling through Europe. Once a
day for one hour we both sat down and drew the same thing and it was
remarkable because I don't remember that trip at all, but I remember
everything I drew. And I remember in great detail. And Theo seems to do
the same.
By the way, he is studying to be a designer. It's probably because of
that trip.
So drawing is discovery. This is John Berger. He knows a crap load more
about this. If you get him to talk about drawing, it would be better
than me talking about it, but it's a way to force yourself to really look
at the object, look at it in detail, really understand it. It's a pretty
wonderful experience and probably wonderful than meditation.
Let's go past that. This is the third reason we draw and this is why we
draw in corporate settings. It's to communicate, to share ideas. There
are some great conventions that have been created around drawing. So I
was an architect formerly. There are symbols that architect's use. That
is not really a door. That door swing is a symbol for a door, but
everybody looks at it and everybody knows it's a door. Same thing with
windows.
We are doing that now for UI. There are conventions now for UI
especially when you are just doing wire framing, things like that.
And again the reason you do it is it makes that thought more precise.
And I already said that, so I won't say it again. When we don't draw, it
turns out everybody has a different image in their head and we can get,
we think we are on the same page but we are not.
Drawing, architecture drawing. This is the architecture practice that I
was a part of 20 years ago? Twenty-five years ago? With my partner, Wes
Johns. So the other reason, this is the other reason we draw. We draw
to realize things. So that more and more when we are drawing in this
context, when we are drawing UI, we are actually drawing the plans so
something can get built. In architecture, they have been doing it a long
time. It's the bridge between the imagination and the actual thing. You
try to draw it in great detail so that people will know exactly how to
build it.
That works pretty well.
And then this is just an important point. Everybody knows who Ken
Robinson is, right? Sir Ken Robinson? Yeah, he talks a lot about
similar topics, about the importance of creativity and how it is
basically being beat out of children. Bad way to express it, but this
whole idea of trying to get creativity back into education again, but one
of the key things about firing your imagination and then making your
imagination useful is making that transition from where it's locked in
your head and out there in the world.
Oh, and these hands. This is Adrian Newey. Any Formula One fans?
Adrian Newey was and he's now, the aerodynamicist for Red Bull which for
a number of years and this talk was better when it was true, was the most
successful Formula One team. And they may only not be successful because
Adrian left for awhile. But he draws like this with a pen and a ruler
and protractors. He draws by hand. Everybody else is using the most
high end sophisticated computers to model these things and he's drawing
like this. And again is considered the best aerodynamicist in the world.
He's working on the America's Cup campaign right now, too. The way he
explains it, he has to because he can feel the answers. It will be
interesting. The only reason this is here is I know Panos and the team
at Surface already know this. They are trying to figure out how do we
get physical objects back into computing, that are spatial and
kinesthetic senses that are going to come back into play. I think we are
going to be able to think better.
The other reason we draw, and this is what most people think of
withdrawing is it's like art. It's to express yourself. And I put this
in here because this is a talk about the value of drawing. This is a
Raphael and it sold for $47.8 million. So drawing is valuable. There
are other reasons it's valuable. That's a pretty good reason. None of
my drawings have gone for $47.8 million.
So last part of the talk. This is why you can draw and how you should go
about it. A lot of people say they can't draw. In fact, most people say
they can't draw. At my last job I took on drawing as one of my own
initiatives. I had a team to run, but I still liked to design software.
So we did a combination hardware and software project, basically to
create drawing applications for the iPad. And every single person that
joined that team said: But I can't draw. And within a few weeks they
were showing me their drawings and they were super, super proud. The
point was, our tools are just awesome.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: No, the point is it doesn't take much. The easiest
way to learn how to draw is to just draw. It's just not that hard.
Everybody actually can draw a line. It's just if you artificially make
that have some idea of what that line should be and it is not what your
hand does, then you will get frustrated. And it's the same thing. Like
back to, do you know the Kerouac example? If you think you are going to
write like Kerouac you are either brilliant or wrong. And so don't try.
You should learn to draw like you. Because we all have our own personal
expressive qualities. We all have -- and the very essence, we all have
our own line. Everybody draws a line in a slightly different way. You
can be trained to draw a straighter line, like you will learn that if you
pivot from the elbow you actually make a curve. It's just natural. So
people are constantly trying to get, getting rigider and rigider trying
to make a straight line and getting more and more frustrated. They are
still going to make a curve. So you move your whole hand, but you don't
have to. Those curves could be wonderful. There are artists who made
their whole career on, they always draw curves and their whole world, and
maybe it's their eyes, but their whole world is curved. Just embrace the
hand you have, don't worry about it. All good drawing means it supports
your way of thinking. You're already good at drawing. You just don't
frigging know it.
And then you say it would definitely look like what you see. There are a
bunch of techniques for making drawing look like what you actually see.
And they are valuable if you want to do representational drawing. It
would be fun to take classes in that. But it is not interesting.
Everybody has an inner critic. And just tell that critic to shut up.
You have to figure out a way to do that. It's -- I don't know why the
inner critic for creativity is so much more aggressive than your inner
critic in other areas. You know, the ones that are telling you, the one
that was telling me not to say the things I said. I just glanced right
over it. But somehow the one that tells you, look, you're not creative,
it has such a hold on people. That inner critic really doesn't know
anything about drawing. You don't know anything about drawing, and you
actually are that inner critic. So it's pretty obvious. So when it's
saying you don't know how to draw, say you don't know what you're talking
about.
It's pretty easy.
And then you say I'm not an artist. It is really important to understand
that's not the point. Some people are artists and God bless them. I'm
glad they're in the world. They make it richer. You don't have to be an
artist to draw. And it is not about talent. There are some people, it's
scientifically proven like everything else in my talk. There are some
people who are just amazing drafts man drafts women, drafts people that
you just like come out of the womb and you draw. There are amazing
perceptual connections. You see it, you perceive it, you draw it. Oh,
that was actually the slide that was missing. eidetic memories? You
know, the percentages are -- I keep reading different studies. I think
it's up to 15 percent of all children up to the age of three basically
have photographic memories and then it drops down pre-sip to usually
until there's like really weird adults. By the way, my dad was one of
them. Different story for a different time, maybe over beers. He would
draw dollar bills, flat out. He could draw any denomination. He could
probably draw anything. But dollar bills are a good thing to draw at the
bar if you want to make a 20-dollar bet. They would start drawing the
20-dollar bill until they gave him the 20 bucks because he had it in his
head. He was a freak, but he could do that.
[chuckling.]
>> Michael Gough: So in this case it is not really about talent. It's
about the patience and the practice. Right? So we are not all going to
be the next great baseball player. Most people with a little bit of
training can hit a ball. And that's your goal. You are just trying to
hit the ball. You are not trying to be -- I was going to say Barry
bonds, but there are so many negative connotations now, I won't.
And you could say, look, you're just embarrassed or you don't really see
the point. You don't want people to see your drawing. This is a total
aside for a different talk, but remember the part where I said the
decision, there's that time in your life where you make a decision about
whether you're creative or not? I have this way of telling. You walk
into a classroom and everybody is drawing. But one is drawing like this,
doesn't want you to see what they're doing? They are still creative.
They haven't given up yet and they are starting to develop all of the
negative aspects of being creative. One of them is you're never done and
you can't share. And so they, most creatives are easily embarrassed.
The point is for drawing, this is a selfish act, right? So far you are
not drawing because you are going to be the next great drafts person.
You are not going to be an artist. You are just drawing for you. This
is something that you are doing because it is going to help you think
better. It is going to help expand the creative centers of your brain.
And then you say it's complicated. It's time-consuming. I've got too
much to do. I can't hardly get through this talk.
So here is actually the most valuable information. Draw a little. Don't
set out to do something big and major like draw -- do you do fashion?
>> Yes.
>> Michael Gough: She already knows how to draw. That's cheating. But
just draw a little, but do it often. In those little spaces where you're
not quite paying attention to the meeting you're in, just draw anything.
You know, you could start with squares. Graduate to coffee cups. But do
it on a regular basis, simple things that you don't really care about
what the conclusion is.
I have two little things I appear pended to the end of my talk. The
first one, these are like things to think about or things I should be
thinking about, but now I'm torturing you with them. The first is this
weekend I'm going to a gallery opening and an artist named Pam Keely is
speaking there. She's a very talented artist who draws. That's her
focus, her discipline. And she had some kind of major creative block
some years ago. And couldn't figure out what to do about it. So she is
kind of maybe -- this is the meta level. I'm trying to encourage you all
to draw, to open up your creativity. She was drawing every day and her
creativity still got blocked. So she started drawing with both hands.
And I'm really -- I would love to do like a whole get her in the MRI, do
a whole research project about that. Because the next stage in thinking
about this drawing to unlock will creativity and the kinesthetic sense
and the parts of the brain. What if you're doing, you are using the one
hand to get back to the other part of the brain. I'm blown away by it.
And her work is absolutely astounding. I'm trying to get more
information you need, but I'm trying to get a Surface hub to her this
weekend so that she can draw with both hands and everybody can watch.
This is basically one of her paintings. And it is -- it's like weaving
when she draws. Both hands are just going like that. It means
something. I don't know what. Both hands.
And then the last thing is, I took this new job. I probably already told
you about that. I'm here now. And most of our customers don't draw.
Now, maybe we should encourage them to, but I don't think it is going to
be core to our business. Taking just a slight step back from that,
really, really fascinated now with the relationship between typing and
handwriting. There is a whole body of research that we retain better -you can write, you can listen to this entire talk, type the whole thing
and not have heard a word, which I think is a remarkable skill, but court
reporters have proved it, you know, for generations. They have no idea
what was going on, but they faithfully recorded every word.
For some reason typing and maybe it's just the facility. Like you can do
such a better job of recording. You don't hear. You don't -- or you
don't understand. And so when you hand write your Notes like in a class,
you retain more of the information. You process it. You actually act on
it. If you read most people's Notes, they are not verbatim what was
said. It's actually what they thought of it, what it means. And so I am
excited about that because we are making pretty major investments right
now in pen and if we start really focusing on handwriting as interface,
so not just as a tool for doodling or for recording but actually the
interface itself, I wonder if we are going to unlock some of these other
parts of the brain, help people be a little bit more well rounded, a
little bit more thoughtful. I just think there's an opportunity there.
Maybe a whole nother talk. If one of you want to get that talk together,
I would be happy to find you venues to give it.
That's it.
[applause.]
>> John Boylan: Thank you. That was great. Do we have any questions?
We have some time. And again, if you just put them, push the little
button and write them and I will moderate.
So go ahead.
>> Michael Gough:
hand quicker.
I am going to go back there first.
And he raised his
>>: That's okay. I want to know about the parts of education in
elementary schools.
>> Michael Gough:
Yes.
>>: I don't draw much, but I get the sense that it is being taught as
[indiscernible] that there is just a lot of big -- it was used initially
as just a little bit of motor control and then nothing happens and then I
heard earlier they come to a crisis point where something happens and
they give up.
>> Michael Gough:
Yes.
>>: So what are your thoughts on what are the best ways to fix or
improve the situation?
>> Michael Gough: The same caveat, I'm not a scientist, I'm also not an
education expert, but I love talking about it.
So you know, everybody has an opinion, that whole thing. I am really,
really conflicted about the emerging STEAM effort, trying to bring the
arts education back, only because first of all you are absolutely right.
It was taught as bad or worse than math is taught in schools today. With
the same interesting challenges. In math they teach procedures, methods.
They don't grow understanding. And in art, I remember my kindergarten
art class, I made a clay -- what do you call it? Cigarette, where you
put your cigarettes? Ashtray! Yes. I made a clay ashtray. Everybody
in the class made a clay ashtray. What did I learn? I mean, absolutely
nothing. Teaching creativity makes total sense. There's actually a
whole body of work on how to teach creativity. Now, you might make
something out of clay in the process of learning to be creative. So I do
think we need creative as part of our education.
One of the tough parts is, you can't separate it. It is not creativity
applied to -- well, I don't know. Art itself. It should be cut across
all the disciplines. The professor that had that one slide on has been
teaching drawing in math classes for a long, long time. Because there's
a lot of spatial concepts and a lot of relationships. She just finds
that when you use drawing it unlocks those.
So that is one place where drawing, and also creativity could apply. So
my short answer is totally agree, both are taught incredibly badly.
Believe that both could be taught incredibly well. And that hinges on
stop calling it art. Start calling it creativity.
>>:
Any suggestions on short-term things that parents can do?
>> Michael Gough: Oh, yeah. I can get you resources and references.
First of all, be super open minded about what your children draw. Get
them all to draw. My biggest focus right now, I'm on the board of a
school down in the Bay area. And it is about applied knowledge. As
curious as it may sound, there were tons more, I guess higher creative
quotient in my generation, the generation that grew up with a shop or a
garage, like a place to make stuff. When you're engaging positively with
your world, you're making it what you want it to be. Pretty magical
things happen. There's a lot of creative learning that happens just in
that. How old are your kids?
>>:
Seven.
>> Michael Gough: Seven? Yeah, they should be building stuff all the
time. Building stuff, drawing. It doesn't really take much more than
that. Then nonjudgmental. That's pretty important, too.
It's your turn.
>>:
So I just talked to you a lot.
>> Michael Gough:
That's kind of awesome.
>>: You did that great interview about the digital pen when it first
came out. You said that that's your new favorite method of drawing,
digital pen on glass.
>> Michael Gough:
Yes.
>>: Do you feel like that that stimulates the same part of the
creativity in your brain as drawing on paper?
>> Michael Gough: Yes and no. First of all, we've got along ways to go
to unlock some of the stronger tactile aspects of drawing on glass. The
reason that it became, that I got addicted to it was two fold. First of
all, there was something super, super liberating about not worrying about
the commitment that you just made to a sheet of paper. I mean, it was
just freeing. I started drawing a lot more because I didn't have to -you get to the point, for those of you who have notebooks, at first it's
pretty open and wonderful. If you get about six years of notebooks in,
you remember that you keep going back and you look at the old ones. And
you go, my God, that's embarrassing. Why did I draw that? And so as the
body of work gets greater, and this can happen just within one book. The
level of commitment gets higher and higher. And the digital stuff, you
know, we had three finger unwind. So you could just unwind your drawing
and then start again. Or you could fast forward again. So almost, I
guess the lack of commitment was really freeing. So that was awesome.
There was also, there's a bunch of flexibility in digital tools. This is
less about commitment and more about resources. Like having all of my
paraphernalia around me was hard. So in that regard it was equally
freeing.
Now, to fast forward to today? I've kind of gone back to notebooks and
part of it is -- I can't get my damn Surface to work.
[laughter.]
>> Michael Gough: I have been struggling a little bit and some of the
tools aren't as strong. So I haven't been carrying an iPad around to
meetings, although I did carry a Mac today to this one, but I think we
are close. For anybody who has been and seen the latest pen work that
the Surface team is doing, it's getting so good. It really is getting to
that point where what you meant is actually what gets drawn on the
screen. So in that regard, it will continue to be my favorite.
Yes?
>>: Just to address the question about arts education and especially in
kids, there's a lot of initiatives happening that where teaching artists
come into classes and work over a long-term, not just once or twice but
maybe over a whole term where the students might be dealing with social
studies or math or history, and say create comic book zines, so the kids
collectively crate their own zines about say the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
It's not judged on how good the drawings were, but how cool a zine were
you able to draw from that's happening across the board. The City of
Seattle is working with the school district to actually bring,
reintroduce arts education into the schools. It goes at least two hours
a week in all schools over time. A lot of that will be drawing and
similar activities. So it's happening across the board. It's just ->> Michael Gough:
>>:
It takes some time.
It takes time, but I think it's good.
>> Michael Gough:
Yeah.
All right.
Go ahead.
>>: This is another question, but a story. When I was about 13 I had a
300-page workbook in school and I doodled all over it, every page, the
whole thing, the whole term. And at the end of the school year the
teacher said I either get an A -- this is a parent-teacher conference
with my parents sitting there. She said she was going to give me a B
because she had told me not to doodle and she said she would give me an A
if I erased them all. I said I would not do so. Because I felt, as I
was doing all the doodles, I was listening, paying attention to what I
was reading and that's how I was absorbing it and to this day I am glad I
made that decision to take the B.
>> Michael Gough: I got very, very lucky in -- it wasn't sixth grade, it
was seventh, Mr. Bean. Because he noticed that I was drawing all the
time. I had been constantly told, you have to stop. You're not paying
attention. And he figured out that no, it was the way I processed
information. Part of it was my drawings were of the things in the class,
the talk. It was just the way I recorded information. So I had kind of
the exact opposite experience. Somebody unlocked that for me. And
pointed out to me how valuable that was. It's cool you figured it out
yourself. But yeah, that teacher should be shot.
[laughter.]
>>:
That's partly, it just wasn't worth all the time --
>> Michael Gough:
[laughter.]
>>:
To do it?
It wasn't a political statement?
[speaker away from microphone.]
But I felt like I really was learning the material and the doodling
wasn't preventing it. It was facilitating it.
>> Michael Gough:
You're right.
Yes?
>>: I'm dating someone who is very, very analytical but he's constantly
asking me to give him sketching lessons because we want to work on things
like apps and get ideas out together.
>> Michael Gough:
Yeah.
>>: I'm stumped as to how to get him to stop being afraid of making
marks on paper. I don't know if you have some fun activities to throw at
me to suggest?
>> Michael Gough: You know, I am going to point you to somebody. We can
make -- for anybody who has any additional questions, I'm just
Mgough@Microsoft.com. I'm going to connect you with a kid named Matthew
Richmond. He did all of the drawing classes for Adobe when we were first
getting this out here. He and his wife have these amazing exercises. So
we will just make that personal connection and you'll have a world class
drawing teacher.
>>:
Great.
>> Michael Gough:
>> John Boylan:
Matthew will be really happy about that.
Anyone else?
>>: Just maybe like a related question to Eric. Like designers, I'm a
designer and we often get to what we call the experience reviews. Like
critique with all the way up to our VPs and they come in and they give
their opinions, right?
And I would rather have them give their analysis, but they give their
opinion on what is being presented.
>> Michael Gough:
Yes.
>>: Often they want like high fidelity stuff. Part of me is puzzled by
where are they drawing this. critique from? Most of them don't draw so
where are the opinions coming from? And how can we make them more
sensitive to what they are saying and enable us to do a better job with
the products we are presenting. Not just like responding to opinions and
say: I don't like pink so you can't do that. You can't have pink or I
would rather have purple.
>> Michael Gough:
>>:
Right.
How can we help them?
>> Michael Gough: So there is a whole talk there. And my entire career
and yours too, that idea of getting to people, to understand the impact
of each comment they make. So people in positions of authority get there
because they are good at making decisions. You know, the command and
control thing. And so they apply that to the full range of things. They
probably apply that to picking airline seats or bathroom stalls. But
when they apply it to design, it turns out to a lot of other things that
they don't have a full grasp of, they can do some serious damage. If
what they do is give you the impression that you have to listen to what
they said to do and not what it meant, what motivated it. So we all have
opinions. All our opinions are valid. If you can get to what motivated
the opinion, not what was the -- like if they said it can't be pink,
that's a little bit ->>:
It is a reaction rather than --
>> Michael Gough: What were they reacting to? Why were they reacting to
that? We want as designers to listen. All the time, listen so hard that
it basically changes our opinions about things. But you have to listen
not to what was said but what was meant or what motivated it. That's the
most important thing. But then we can have a nine-year conversation
about how to do that.
I will tell you one other thing that I found works really well in a
corporate environment, which is specific I guess to the pink. Personal
taste should be off the table. I am a little bit concerned -- actually
I'll go ahead since I'm already in trouble, appalled how many different
visual styles there are at Microsoft. Everybody does their own. So as a
result, it is just personal opinion. This team does whatever the hell
they want, this team does whatever the hell they want. Nobody is wrong
because there is no right or wrong between pink and red, for instance.
But if it was always pink, then red is wrong. And so you want to get to
that point quickly. You want to get to a common vocabulary. And
companies that do that, the Porsches of the world. You don't say: You
know, I just don't like these round shapes. I'm going to make a square
Porsche. It wouldn't be a Porsche! It wouldn't make any sense at all.
You just don't do that.
So it has two advantages. It removes personal taste. It also gives
everybody a leg up in the conversation because everybody knows what the
vocabulary is. Everybody knows what it is supposed to look like. Let's
get back to how it works, which is more important than what it looks
like. And more important than that, we were talking about this earlier.
What does it mean? What are we actually doing for our customers? How
are they going to think about this? Feel about it? What does it mean to
them?
So we have some work to do to get there. But there's a lot of good work
happening right now. Ten is more cohesive than I think some of the
previous operating systems were. There's still some 8 in there and
there's still some Vista in there, which is concerning, but we are moving
in the right direction. I would love if we all just collapsed on one
visual stime and we just didn't care anymore. It just wasn't the
priority. We would get better and better at it all the time. We
wouldn't just stop, but we would be working on a cohesive body of work.
That's one I feel pretty passionate about.
>>:
So coming back to the point of arts for kids?
>> Michael Gough:
Yes.
>>: I have been looking for some help. Like I need some
about like how to heartily encourage kids to do more arts
myself, I grew out of -- I was given the job that I code,
do painting, sketching, all those things. I have a small
house where I do all sorts of things.
>> Michael Gough:
references
because I
but every day I
room in my
Yeah.
>>: But I am completely confused on how to encourage my eight-year-old
and he doesn't want to draw. Doesn't want to sketch. And me or my wife,
we are never critical about what he does. Like how he does.
>> Michael Gough:
Yeah.
>>: Because I was taught by my sister. I know that you should not
criticize an artist but for example, my friend's daughter, like every day
she draws like tens of different things. But I am telling to encourage - I am failing to encourage my son.
>> Michael Gough: There's some interesting psychological stuff going on,
so again I'm not a scientist. What else did I say I wasn't? I'm not an
educator and I'm not a psychologist.
[laughter.]
>> Michael Gough: But the conventional wisdom is just time and
opportunity, right? If you -- oh, and modeling. The three things you
normally do, you're already doing. You make sure the resources are there
everywhere. So if the moment the inspiration strikes, the tools are
available. You model the behavior. Which you are already doing. So I
think the question would be in modeling the behavior, are you getting
eight years old male? Yeah. Are you already getting the I don't know
what I'm going to do, but it's not going to be what my dad does. It's
somewhere around there. So some of it could be that. Which I can't help
you with at all.
But most of the stuff you are already doing is right. There should be
the behavior should be modeled. Everybody should be drawing in your
household. And the materials should be there. And then I guess you
mostly have to be patient. Baseball bats, too, they work sometimes.
[chuckling.]
>>:
One more, yeah.
>>: I'm just interested in learning more about what your charter is and
reason you came to Microsoft, and what you see yourself doing in the next
year.
>> Michael Gough:
>>:
Oh, here at Microsoft?
Yeah, yeah.
>> Michael Gough: Oh, so -- what can I talk about? I came here with a
narrow charter and a broad possibility. So the narrow charter was to
help Julie Larson-Green in her role as [HKSA]. That might be a broad
charter, too. But the short-term is they have a team that is working on
agent technology. So I am supporting them, or leading them depending on
how you look at it. I came here because over the course of nine months
of being worn down by various people I finally I, it hit me that somebody
is going to build her. You know, the movie Her? Somebody is going to
build that and I knew it wasn't going to be Adobe. It might be Apple,
but I don't know if you know people who work there. It is an interesting
challenge. It might be Google, but I didn't like the commute.
So Microsoft made sense. So that is the glib answer.
But also I have been spending a lot of time with executives like Sachia
and Chi. We're trying to figure out how to make design more impactful
here at Microsoft. So I'm either going to be part of the problem or part
of the solution, one of the two.
Yeah. Yes?
>>: I have a more manic question regarding the actual pen and style
lust. I think a lot of what you said totally resonates with me in terms
of a lot of folks are basically either cold or their inner critic tells
them to stop drawing. I think that's one of the primary reasons why the
devices that are primarily focused on the style lusts are not having a
wide penetration in the market, right? Because it's one of those things
where like this is not essential for a majority of people, while keyboard
probably is. Or touch, we can argue.
But given that we are so heavily bangs betting -- and the Surface,
heavily betting on the differentiator, the pen, and other types of
device, but now we're having more competition, but I think pushing the
message of everybody should draw is super important business decision for
us to make.
[chuckling.]
>>: So this company, you know, [Touris] Lee -- I'm going to get in
trouble, but [Touris] Lee has a very hard way of marketing and teaching
consumers through marketing. Like they keep changing the consumer mind
set through marketing.
What are your thoughts on that? How do we actually change that because I
think if we even succeed in changing a few percent of that thing, it's
not millions, it's billions of dollars. Right? What are your thoughts
on that and how much can you share?
>> Michael Gough: So let me back up a little bit. I think I mentioned
earlier that, or was I talking to you then? Most of the things that are
break through operate at the level of categories. So our brains are all
set up so that we categorize things. That's where prejudice comes from.
It's also how we know how to operate a door every time we see a door,
right? Because they are a broad category. They are doors. They open.
We know it.
Consumers have the same kind of behavior. So there are broad categories
like Nike athleticism, Adobe, creativity. And we had this category that
we are now calling productivity. It used to be office. It used to be a
little more straightforward. It was certain category of work usually you
had a shirt with a collar and you sat all day.
So we really owned that category. The shirt with the collar, sit all
day. And that category has been eroding. So we have to figure out what
the next category is. I think it's still work and that's kind of
exciting, but we haven't figured out how to describe it yet. We haven't
figured out how to think about it internally enough that we can come up
with a platform for explaining it externally. So I wouldn't blame
marketing for that because if we just make a pile of stuff and we say,
you know, help us sell this pile of stuff, they are always going to have
a hard time. There's been a remarkable bag of doorknobs at Microsoft for
a long, long time. There's been some points of cohesion, but there's
also -- it's just a broad, broad story.
Quick editorial side comment. Everybody is rooting for us. I mean, if
marketing, if we want right now to take the world by storm, they will let
us. The Microsoft brand, people just are hoping, right? They are just
like do it! Come on! You know, wow us.
And I think pen input could be a big part of that, getting more narrow
now. We associate it with either creativity or drawing or just work.
But the work we haven't done yet is, it doesn't frigging do anything. So
if you are going to replace other input methods, it has to actually
replace them. And we have to approve the value. So pen for most kinds
of recording, where that digital recording actually becomes useful,
that's something we have to do now. I know the one-note team is all over
it trying to figure it out. Pen for command, we have to do that.
Then if it -- it turns out that that kinesthetic activity makes you more
productive or a better worker? Then we will definitely be on to
something. Then we can go out and market that. But we don't quite have
it yet. So I'm rambling now, but one of the things that marketing could
do is talk about it externally and convince all of us to build it. That
would be another approach.
Steve Jobs was famous for that. It was out on the bus shelter and
everybody is going: We're building that?
[laughter.]
>> Michael Gough: We can do that as well.
You had a question in the back?
>>:
So quickly --
>> Michael Gough: One interruption. I know people have like real lives
and stuff like that. So it is not -- we are over time. So if you need
to leave, please feel free.
>> John Boylan:
We are not over time.
>> Michael Gough:
>> John Boylan:
Without embarrassment.
Maybe this will be the last question.
>> Michael Gough:
Yeah.
>>: So coming back to the point about betting on the stylus and making
it very useful and your message about getting people to draw. Would you
support a program for the style lust for the whole company to draw?
>> Michael Gough: Great idea. I think it's a really, really good idea.
The program that I did with the SLT around creativity, we are looking for
the next steps in that. So that might be like a drawing program across
the company. It would be amazing.
One of the things that convinced me to come here was a meeting that I had
about a year ago with members of the SLT and then the leadership team in
my old company. And for whatever reason, maybe this is still true, but
around the table Chi and Sachia and I can't remember who else was in that
meeting. They all had the Surface Pro 3s and they were handwriting all
their notes. I thought: I've come to heaven. This is a world where the
pen rules! So we should probably go ahead and just make it that. It's a
really good idea.
>> John Boylan:
Anything else?
>>: I want to know your favorite [indiscernible] software or app or
digital?
>> Michael Gough: I got in an insane amount of trouble for answering
this question a few years ago. Because my old CEO found out because I
said it was George's -- God, what is the name of his product? Crap.
On the iPad.
>>:
[speaker away from microphone.]
>> Michael Gough: Paper by 53. That's the courier team, right? So most
of that innovation happened here. Love the product because the line is
so right. And the color work is so simple. And the interface is
actually, it just doesn't get in your way. Like you can be in flow.
So of the drawing apps, there are some that are better, but that was my
favorite for quite a bit of time.
The one that I worked on is called Line. I believe Adobe is about to
discontinue it. But the reason that I loved that one, I used these for
two different purposes. It supports a digital ruler. So I drew as an
architect. I'm so used to be able to quickly draw the straight lines.
It has a physical version of that ruler and then one that you can just
captures two-points. And I loved drawing in that. That one is -- if I
had to choose between the two, I think the Paper one is still more
useful, but the Line one is more fun.
Thanks, everybody.
>> John Boylan: Okay.
Michael.
[applause.]
(End of session.]
Thank you all.
We appreciate it.
Thank you,